Finance: Bitcoin is sinking as bitcoin cash goes live

Bitcoin is likely to be split in two.

Bitcoin is trading down 5.78% at $2,715 following word that bitcoin cash has gone live. A split in the blockchain has not yet been detected.

A civil war has been brewing between core developers, who want to keep the blocks that make up bitcoin's network limited in their size to protect it from hacks, and miners, who want to make the blocks bigger to improve the network's speed.

Two years of disagreement have come to a head on Tuesday with the pending fork in the cryptocurrency. Bitcoin exchange Coinbase describes a fork as a "change to the software of the digital currency that creates two separate versions of the blockchain with a shared history." What will emerge is a bitcoin rival called bitcoin cash.

"Bitcoin cash basically came out of nowhere," Charlie Morris, the chief investment officer of NextBlock Global, an investment firm with digital assets, told Business Insider."A group of miners who didn't like SegWit2x are going to opt for this new software that will increase the size of blocks from the current 1 megabyte to 8."

Bitcoin holders will see their holdings double, but that doesn't mean the value will double. The decline in bitcoin will most likely be equal to the price of bitcoin cash, according to Morris.

Bitcoin is up 190% so far this year.

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